The feature-film debut of writer-director Dan Harris is a coping-with-suicide comedy, or dramedy at the very most, and lukewarm either way, about the aftershocks of an Olympic hopeful's abrupt exit. Those left behind include Emile Hirsch, a sort of cross between Leo DiCaprio and Clea DuVall, as the unathletic younger …
A new spin on the old boss's-daughter romance. And not just new, but contemporary, up-to-date, timely, topical. The romancer is now the boss himself -- a fast-track junior executive fresh out of business school and still wet behind the ears -- and the daughter's father is now the romancer's underling, …
Curtis Hanson's handling of the Jennifer Weiner book, lightly, mildly, breezily entertaining in a second-rate, best-sellerish, chick-lit kind of way: the seriocomic story of two mismatched Jewish sisters, one an overweight, high-achieving Philadelphia lawyer whose private life consists of romance novels and a shoe fetish, and the other a rootless …
Filmmaker John Boorman takes up the South African apartheid problem after its solution, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the mid-Nineties offered amnesty to political criminals, provided they could demonstrate a political motive for their crimes, in exchange for their public confession and confrontation of their victims. Juliette Binoche …
Leftist arm-twister, slickly done, about an unspeakably cute kid in civil-war-torn El Salvador ca. 1980, not so much a character as a poster child, who becomes "the man of the house" in his father's absence, and awaits conscription in the military on his twelfth birthday. Some of the random gunfire …
A revisitation of the advent and aftermath of what we might call, with more literal meaning than usual, the seminal work in "adult" films of the modern era, or what Camille Paglia calls, with her characteristic amount of self-restraint, "an epochal moment in the history of human sexuality." It's a …
Sydney Pollack's name on a topical thriller offers no guarantee, but it offers at least a promise. A promise, to be more specific, of tweedy dullness and liberal softness: Havana, The Firm, Absence of Malice, Three Days of the Condor. And was Random Hearts a thriller as well? Hard to …
Caribbean treasure hunters stumble upon a Civil War-period sunken ship -- "the motherlode of all motherlodes" -- in the same vicinity as a downed drug-smuggling plane. Juvenile aquatic adventure reaches out -- or up, if you prefer -- to the MTV crowd through reggae tunes, water sports, itsy-bitsy bikinis (on …
The beginning takes place in the vicinity of an Orwellian dystopia, where a closely monitored populace ("Sodium Excess Detected," reads out a urinal at a morning pee) must live in regimented drudgery and sterile isolation, under stricter rules against intergender "proximity" than at a Catholic-school dance, and with the desperate …
Time-travel contrivance, at least as convoluted as it is clever: a Gulf War vet, subjected to crackpot experiments in a mental hospital, bodily visits the future, accidentally bumps into a big girl whom he had once bumped into as a little girl, learns of his earlier death, endeavors to avert …
A pretty dream, inspired by fact, of brotherhood on the WWI battlefield, with the French, the Scots, and the Germans all laying down their arms on Christmas Eve, 1914, and celebrating the holiday together. (Big treat for everyone: Diane Kruger, as a Danish diva, visits her lover in the trenches …
Muted cultural clash, when a Chicago gallery dealer (Embeth Davidtz) drags her new husband (Alessandro Nivola) back to his Carolina roots so she can woo a modestly obscene "outsider" artist ("I love all the dogs' heads, and computers, and all the scrotums") and, secondarily, so she can meet his family: …
Broad comedy about a high-school fatso who slims down to become a callous Casanova in adulthood. Unlike him, the humor never slims down, remains broad throughout; heavy; clumsy; lazy. With Ryan Reynolds, Amy Smart, Anna Faris, and Chris Klein; directed by Roger Kumble.